With the development of information technology, computer vision and image information processing are becoming more and more important. Therein, the moving status of a target object can be determined by an optical flow method based on image information. The optical flow method can be applied in a number of fields, such as military astronautics, traffic surveillance, information science, meteorology, and medicine, etc.
The concept of optical flow was first introduced by Gibson in 1950. A physical object can be imaged by photosensitive elements. Each point in the resulted image is in a one-to-one correspondence with a respective point on the physical object. When the target object is moving in a three-dimensional scene, the brightness patterns of the corresponding image frame sequence will exhibit certain relevant flows. Such flows of image brightness patterns can be referred to as optical flows.
At present, optical flow algorithms are normally rather complex and computation-intensive. In order to perform optical flow calculations, front-end image acquisition devices are required to capture images at a high frame rate, then subsequent image processing devices perform computation-intensive optical flow analysis.
The existing optical flow algorithms require multiple frames of image information at first, then perform optical flow analysis through a relative high intensity of computation. Therefore, the existing optical flow analysis devices have a high requirement on data processing capabilities, and need improvement in real-timeness.
Therefore, the invention proposes a new scheme for optical flow acquisition.